What people see on the outside has so little to do with what takes place on the inside that sometimes it feels incredible there should have been any connection between the two at all.
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1.4.09
on friendship
It might be said of a writer that it is not his or her job to like his or her friends.
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But then there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are of skinning a cat; which is also to say that there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are ways of liking them.
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But then there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are of skinning a cat; which is also to say that there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are ways of liking them.
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dream diary xmas 08, ipswich
The events of the dream(s), the details, are of less importance than the fact of the dream. However, for the benefit of context I shall attempt to describe them.
I met up with H in South Africa. We spent a lot of time in a car. The clutch was slipping. Sometimes H drove but most of the time I did. We were in some kind of valley. At one point I had to clamber up a slippery muddy slope; at another we were trapped in a lift in an old building into which a black cat had crawled. At another we became separated, and I walked through a village where a girl approached me, begging me to sleep with her and pay her, her whole family in tow. I gave the girl 20 pounds, which was all the money I had in my wallet, and an old 70 real note which no-one recognised as currency.
[My nephew is playing a Boo game with me]
Later H and I rediscovered each other and kept driving. There is much that I’ve left out. But the real thing that has struck me about the dream is the way it both reminded and revealed to me a sense of intimacy with H. Intimacy which has nothing to do with sex (although the consummation may be found there), but the knowledge of one for the other, and the other for one, of spending time in each other’s pockets. An intimacy which engenders a way of speaking, knowing, sharing. Its been so long now since H and I knew one another, both as lovers and as friends, that I have all but forgotten it. I would almost have been ready to accept her commandment that we no longer know one another, and that to claim otherwise would be to claim a false knowledge. The dream restored the intimacy, which can, I suspect, never be quite annihilated. The intelligence, humour and love which accompanies it. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt about H. Maybe I’m only just ready for it.
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I met up with H in South Africa. We spent a lot of time in a car. The clutch was slipping. Sometimes H drove but most of the time I did. We were in some kind of valley. At one point I had to clamber up a slippery muddy slope; at another we were trapped in a lift in an old building into which a black cat had crawled. At another we became separated, and I walked through a village where a girl approached me, begging me to sleep with her and pay her, her whole family in tow. I gave the girl 20 pounds, which was all the money I had in my wallet, and an old 70 real note which no-one recognised as currency.
[My nephew is playing a Boo game with me]
Later H and I rediscovered each other and kept driving. There is much that I’ve left out. But the real thing that has struck me about the dream is the way it both reminded and revealed to me a sense of intimacy with H. Intimacy which has nothing to do with sex (although the consummation may be found there), but the knowledge of one for the other, and the other for one, of spending time in each other’s pockets. An intimacy which engenders a way of speaking, knowing, sharing. Its been so long now since H and I knew one another, both as lovers and as friends, that I have all but forgotten it. I would almost have been ready to accept her commandment that we no longer know one another, and that to claim otherwise would be to claim a false knowledge. The dream restored the intimacy, which can, I suspect, never be quite annihilated. The intelligence, humour and love which accompanies it. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt about H. Maybe I’m only just ready for it.
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